Jewish/Non-Jewish Gnosis

In his history of Christianity, August Neander distinguished between gnostics who arose from within Judaism and those whose inspiration came from “Oriental” modes of thought. Here is his description of the Jewish sources of gnosticism:

In the following respect, all these Gnostics agree ; they all held . . . to a world consisting of the pure emanation of life from God, a creation evolved directly out of the divine essence, far exalted above the outward creation produced by God’s plastic power, and conditioned by a preexisting matter. They agree moreover in this, that they did not admit the Father of that higher world of emanation, o be the immediate author of this lower world, but maintained that the lower creation proceeded from the World-former, (??????????, )a being of kindred nature with the universe formed and governed byhim, and far inferior to that higher system and the Father of it.

Buthere arose a difference among them ; for while they all maintained thefact of such a subordination, they did not agree in their conceptions asto the particular mode of its existence. Some, taking their departure from ideas which had long prevailed among certain Jews of Alexandria, (as appears from comparing the Alexandrian version of the Old Testament, and from Philo,) supposed that the Supreme God createdand governed the world by ministering spirits, by the angels.

At the head of these angels stood one, who had the direction and control of all ; hence called the opificer and governor of the world. This Demiurge they compared with the plastic, animating, mundane spirit of Plato and the Platonicians, which, too, according to the Timaeus of Plato, strives to represent the ideas of the Divine Reason, in that which is becoming and temporal. This angel is a representative of the Supreme God on this lower stage of existence. He acts, not independently, but merely according to the ideas inspired in him by the Supreme God ; just as the plastic, mundane soul of the Platonists creates all things after the pattern of the ideas communicated by the Supreme Reason. But these ideas transcend the powers of his own limited nature ; he cannot understand them ; he is merely their unconscious organ ; and hence is unable himself to comprehend the whole scope and meaning of the work which he performs. As an organ under
the guidance of a higher inspiration, he reveals what exceeds his own power of conception. And here also they fall in with the current ideas of the Jews, in supposing that the Supreme God had revealed himself to their Fathers through the angels, who served as ministers of his will. From them proceeded the giving of the law by Moses. In the following respect, also, they considered the Demiurge to be a representative of the Supreme God ; — as the other nations of the earth are portioned out under the guidance of the other angels, so the Jewish people, considered as the peculiar people of God, are committed to the especial care of the Demiurge, as his representative.

He revealed also among them, in their religious polity, as in the creation of the world, those higher ideas, which himself could not understand in their true significancy. The Old Testament, like the whole creation, was the veiled symbol of a higher mundane system, the veiled type of Christianity. Among the Jewish people themselves, however, they carefully distinguished, after the example of the Alexandrians, between the great
mass, who are barely a representative type of the people of God, (the Israelites according to the flesh . . . ) and the smaller number, who became really conscious of their destination as the people of God, (the soul of this mass, the spiritual men of Philo; . . . . The latter, with their sensual minds, adhered to the outward form, perceived not that this was barely a symbol, and therefore entered not into the meaning of the symbol. Thus those sensual-minded Jews knew not the angel by whom God revealed himself in all the Theophanies of the Old Testament; knew not the Demiurge in his true relation to the hidden, Supreme God, who never reveals himself in the sensible world. Here, too, they confounded type and archetype, symbol and idea. They rose
no higher than to this Demiurge ; they held him for the Supreme God himself. Those spiritual men, on the contrary, clearly perceived, or at least divined, the ideas veiled under Judaism ; they rose above the Demiurge, to the knowledge of the Supreme God; they are, therefore, properly his true worshippers, (?????????.) The religion of the former was grounded barely on a faith of authority; the latter live in the contemplation of divine things. The former needed to be schooled and disciplined by the Demiurge — by rewards, punishments, and threats; the latter need no such means of discipline; they rise by the buoyancy
of their own minds to the Supreme God, who is only a fountain of blessedness to those that are fitted for communion with him; they love him for his own sake.

When now these Jewish theosophists of Alexandria had come over to Christianity, and with this new religion had united their previous ideas, they saw the spirit of the Old Testament completely unveiled by Christianity, and the highest idea of the whole creation brought clearly to light. The scope and end of the whole creation, and of all human development, now for the first time became clear. As far as the Supreme
Aeon who appeared in the person of Christ, is exalted above the angels and the Demiurge, so far does Christianity transcend Judaism . . . .

If the law was called by Jewish theologians a law dispensed by angels, with a view to mark, in this way, its divine, as opposed to a merely human, origin — this designation is, on the other hand, employed in the apostolic letters, for the purpose of clearly setting forth the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, — of exhibiting the former as the absolute religion, for which all the earlier fragmentary revelations of the divine councils only served to prepare the way. The all-embracing revelation of God in the Son, through whom God himself enters immediately into fellowship with the creature, is opposed to the revelation mediated by the instrumentality of individual angels — individual godlike powers. By the manifestation of the comprehending whole, everything partial is rendered superfluous. The inventions of the Gnostics, in which the whole matter is spun out into a mythical form, turn on this profound idea.